HSBC putting problems in past
‘All our systems are now up and running’
HSBC Bank USA officials say faulty hardware was to blame for last week’s crash of a key computer system, as they shift gears from data recovery efforts toward diagnosing what happened and how to prevent it in the future.
HSBC hopes to wrap up recovery efforts shortly following more than a week of computer problems that affected some customers’ access to funds. The bank reiterated in a statement that customers are “our primary focus of concern” and that it is “working to resolve all customer issues” tied to the computer outage that hindered customers from accessing their money.
“All of our systems are now up and running,” said spokeswoman Francine Minadeo. “We’re still working through the recovery efforts, becoming current on backlogs and current business.”
HSBC has been struggling since at least Aug. 17, when the bank’s core banking system computer in Amherst crashed. Officials now blame “corrupted disks” for creating “a systems issue on our mainframe,” but have not provided more details.
The bank immediately implemented its emergency backup plan to restore its operations, but the computer failure caused tremendous problems for the bank’s 4 million customers nationwide.
Internet banking, ATMs and debit cards were either inaccessible or didn’t work initially. Transactions that had occurred weren’t properly posted to accounts and had to be reprocessed, even as new transactions constantly came in. And account balances were incorrect for several days, hampering customers’ ability to withdraw money or cash checks, while direct-deposit paychecks at Catholic Health System and other employers were held up.
Minadeo said the bank is trying to determine precisely what happened.
“We’re reviewing everything and making sure that what happened will not happen again,” she said.
